It’s interesting that you point to this as a bad thing later on. High returns means you made something that society wants to use, which means you made a lot of people’s lives better with your research.

What you’re saying with this statement is that you think we need more research that doesn’t actually make people better off than they would be if that money had gone to private industry research.

It’s also worth pointing out that, prior to the age of the research university, privately funded research was doing just great. The steam engine, the airplane, internal combustion, the majority of medical research, etc. Humanity had done tremendous research, including some of the most important basic research in history, without the NSF and similar government programs.